Alex Baer

I've been wondering about People again, so that already means I'm in way over my head.

A number of areas keep getting jumbled all together for me, which puts me in pretty good stead with my fellow beings, I guess.

It's likely -- I hope -- that comments and posts on various website pages are not accurate reflections of the intelligence level of my countrymen and countrywomen and countrybeings, and all the counterpartbeings in cities.

There are always a number of uneasy, queasy word-wars in progress on any Comments page. Like opinions, as you've no doubt heard from colloquial references to bodily apertures and orifices, we all have at least one.

The subject matter runs the gamut, from those who believe gamut is the lowest note of the medieval scale, to those who think it is a reference to the entire modern scale of musical notes, and then even on to the nonmusical among us who believe a gamut is the full breadth of human emotional range -- and beyond, to the spooky outsiders and transcendentalists who see a gamut as the entire range of anything, of everything.

Situation Report: I steamed my eyelids open again with real coffee, a nice treat for a weekday. This idle, schedule-less time is a gift from my era. It is a gift from the same chunk of time that decided a long while ago that I was not only economically redundant, but execrably so, and so, I was added to the Shoals of the Doomed & Adrift -- and then expertly excreted from the highly-lauded realm of competitive, cutthroat capitalism and into the murky lagoons and mired holding ponds of Excess Capacity.

In economics, as in most other areas of America life since, oh, 1960, it's best to fog and cloud the real issues, and all-too-human effects, with cold, distancing euphemisms. So, the Shoals of the Shredded & Damned are magically converted -- presto! -- to Excess Capacity. Language is very much like statistics: What is revealed is routine; what is concealed is essential.

Add to this phenomenon of distancing, by language, to things we'd rather not face, one more thing: The purposeful, political maiming of language to accomplish the demands of propaganda. It's why Frank Luntz has Luntzified the language for right-wing think tanks, policy groups, and political hacks, converting the neutral and descriptive inheritance tax and estate tax into the now-infamous, and heinous, barbarian death tax.

Here I am again: I woke up again this morning. And, once again, I ran through all my available choices. Once more, I found no basic improvement in the human condition -- nothing astonishing had happened while I slept, no new options had evolved or hatched or arrived in flying saucers, or tunneled up from the deeps. No thoroughly new way of existing had been birthed, fizzing and crackling into existence from a wormhole's termination point on the surface of the planet nearest my thoroughly beat-up and timeworn footwear.

No, here I was able to again discover life at its simplest: There was the staying-in-the-rack option, or there was the up-and-at-'em angle. While there were no new lifeform alternatives presented overnight -- none that I could detect, at any rate -- at least both of the standard choices were still available. I wake up slow and groggy these days, but I glommed onto that much, sure enough.

Foolishly, I once more pressed the rise-and-shine selection into service. Personally, I blame my bladder for routinely holding me hostage to this narrowest possible range of wake-up choices. Once more, my body was holding me hostage to its demands -- and it would not be the last time in the day, or in this life, that it would cruelly limit my preferences.

The days unfold strangely for anyone puttering around gamely, if lamely, in life. As an amateur human being a long way from pro status, it's possible to stroll among the headlines and footnotes, around the millstones and milestones, taking informal readings on this and that.

Even on a good day, with a stiff, sane breeze blowing across the news websites of the land, it's impossible to gauge the gradations of cultural degradation, to get accurate readings of any kind. It's a gut-feeling sort of enterprise. There are no calibrated anything-ometers to slap into play. There are no national and regional numbers pouring in to Tracking Central. There are no land mine or shock wave or blast zone maps.

There are no compression gradients to be drawn. No depressive ingredients to be withdrawn. Everything unfolds like a mushroom cloud, new ones going off all day long. Sometimes, they are far away and in slow motion. Other times, the flash is sight-searing, and the blast is a sight meant for no eyes.

Here is a story about the present and the future. It is a story about energy. Now, it is a story about fracking. And, not to repeat myself, it is a tale about unbridled madness. Later, the story could be about something else.

For now, there are plenty of deep and scarring errors in this saga, but no redemption -- maybe in time, but not right now. Right now, there is only an equally deep, dank, and abiding feeling the world is no longer under any obligation to make sense, that some elemental bargain has been voided, that some vital bank of dead man's switches has been locked out and they no longer work.

To quote the band Jethro Tull, from Locomotive Breath:

In the shuffling madness

Of the locomotive breath...

the train won't stop going

No way to slow down.

Our era is shuffling madness. Our locomotive breath is the unending hunger for energy, for fossil fuel. Imagine this era and its impossible hungers, and then imagine them slowing down. The train won't stop going -- no way to slow down.

Of course, that train has been barrel-assing along for some time. The world -- its people and systems -- has been straining for a long time, trying to gain, and retain, even a micron of credibility and sense. This old world hasn't made sense for a while and it may not make sense ever again. Or...